Comme-ci, Comme-ca

DEEP IN THE BOWELS of Lowell House, in a cramped room riddled with steam pipes and sighing ventilator shafts. David Win-grove has revived Michel Tremblay's Bonjour, La. Bonjour. Tremblay's play about incest and despair in a Montreal family enjoyed critical success in Canada, made a small splash in New York--and should probably have been allowed to lade into memory thereafter. Though a spirited Lowell House Drama Society production captures enough of Tremblay's lacerating wit to keep the pot boiling for two hours, the script clamps a cover on the actors, and the play never takes off after a promising beginning.

Tremblay unfolds the plot through gradual, cyclic self-revelation. On returning from a three month vacation in Europe to escape his family's problems. Serge has talks with his father and two aunts, his three elder sisters, and his lover, Nicole--and has talks, and has talks, and has talks. Wingrove's blocking is deft: Serge travels an a small circle around his bed, center stage, and is able to enter the houses and lives of each of his relatives with one single step towards their particular corner of the stage. His jerky, frantic movements contrast markedly with the immobility of the others.

Tremblay's dialogue is compressed yet disjointed. Though the individual conversations proceed chronologically, they are interrupted by the others, as if the family had a communal memory and understanding. There is more than a suggestion that Serge is this center, and that the set represents his mind: The bed and Nicole make up the core of Serge's world which is in turn fractured by the individual needs and desires of the others.

The personalities and problems of Serge's relatives are presented in broad strokes: all his sisters suffer failing marriages and are differentiated only by their means of solace: Lucienne drinks and plans an affair. Monique pops mood pills, and Denise relies heavily on the comforts of the refrigerator. The aunts and the father Gabriel (Don Panec) have sketchier difficulties, the stereotyped problems of old age. Gabriel has one additional distinction--he has gone deaf beyond the reach of even the strongest hearing aid, and he dozes in a lonely world, fending off Serge's efforts to reach him.

THE TENSIONS CREATED in the beginning are quite riveting, the result of some fine acting. Nicole Gallant brings a complex pathos to the role of disturbed, pitiful Monique; Elizabeth Marek is refreshingly brassy and carnivorous as the rotund Denise; and Eve Kahn, in hair curlers and a ratty blue bathrobe, makes a comic Aunt Charlotte, mugging as if she were in a French-Canadian farce.

But the initial tensions fail to build, and Tremblay doesn't deepen his characterizations. Serge's sisters just eat, drink, cry, and beseech Serge more and more: help me, be near me, move in with me. The stasis is partly Tremblay's way of showing how rutted the family is; Serge recognizes the pattern and shouts to Lucienne "How many times have we been through this routine?"

But Tremblay goes off the track when he for-sakes a deeper exploration of his characters for emphasizing Serge as a magnet for his sisters' frustrated sexual desires. Adult life has been unpleasant to them; and they hope to recover the imagined innocence of childhood by becoming their baby brother's keeper. The towering irony is that Serge's own childhood, shaped by his sister's loving ministrations, precluded his ever being a paragon of innocent morality: we find out that his lover. Nicole (played by Maura Barry), is actually his fourth sister.

Because the entire family knew about this backstairs relationship, the suspenseful buildup of innuendoes about Serge's unnatural affection for Nicole is a theatrical trick of the worst kind, a bombshell that has no effect on the characters. We could forgive Tremblay these histrionics if he made the moment of our discovery a fulcrum, and swung the family into revealing psychological or moral perceptions. But his probing of Serge's childhood is just pablum from the Freudian stockpot. "We brought you up like a little girl," Lucienne tells Serge, and then berates him for not being gay and thereby escaping the family. It is supposed to be heroic when Serge stands by Nicole, declaring. "It's love, and it's real," but his defiance rings dully. It is not the mores of society he is challenging, but his other sisters, who judge merely that his filial piety should be slightly redirected.

Perhaps if Julian Lowenfeld as Serge could express overpowering impatience, anguish, and self-doubt (the three emotions the playwright relies on), we might take the shaky underpinnings of the play on faith. But though Lowenfeld is intermittently believable, he has an unfortunate habit of substituting decibels for modulations in expression and timbre. His loud rages are contrived rather than compelled: Gabriel, rocking silently in his chair, is the more effective emblem of the family's failure to communicate without hurting. As Monique says after Serge has thoughtlessly ignored her: "That's the first thing we should learn in life, not to ask anyone for anything."

TREMBLAY WOULD HAVE US believe that Serge can be freed from his own past if he becomes self-sufficient, but this means ignoring the plans of others. Tremblay doesn't quite follow through to the plot's implication--that for Serge freedom is incompatible with his need to communicate with and be loved by Nicole and Gabriel. Prolonged silence, the actor's anathema, seems the only escape from Tremblay's determinism. If his characters can't escape their child-hoods and have no outside arbiters to appeal to why should they talk about it at all? Why even say "Bonjour."

Bonjour, La, Bonjour opened in a squash court under Lowell's A Entry, but was moved to-I Entry after Cambridge officials ruled the location a fire hazard. They needn't have worried. Even though Wingrove kindles sufficient sparks in his actors. Tremblay's wintry script ensures that if the smoke detractors do sound in Lowell's asbestos-lined corridors, it will be just another false alarm.